Post Your Comment

31 Comments

Every time I look at the ultra-crowded layout of an mITX board I'm reminded of how dated the main 24 ATX power plug is and how much it would benefit from being replaced. While they were king in the p1 era with the CPU and PCI busses running on 3.3v directly and most other chips on the board designed for 5V; 3.3 and 5V are barely used at all any more but have 3 and 5 wires in the 24pin cable; while -5V has been removed entirely from modern versions of the spec. Dropping to a single 3.3/5v wire and removing the -5v one would free 7 pins directly; and with only 4 power pins left in the legacy connector (3.3, 5, 2 x 12) there's no need for 8 ground pins either. Probably we could drop 5 of them.

This would allow for a successor cable that's only half as large; freeing space on crowded boards and replacing the 24wire cable with a 12 wire one that would be much less of a pain to route in a crowded case. I'm inclined to keep the CPUs 12V separate just to avoid trading one overly fat wire bundle for another and because AIUI the other half of why the CPUs 12V comes in separately is to get it as close to the socket as possible without crowding the area with everything else.Reply

While we are at why do motherboards virtually never come with the ATX connector being at right angles rather than straight up - we get that for SATA connectors and it seriously improves cable managementReply

Not such a good idea for mITX boards, when you might expect to install them in small cases such as the Antec ISK110 or Minibox M350. Right-angled ATX power or sata ports would be blocked off.

How about RAM though? Why not use SO-DIMMs that are about 60% the size of regular DIMMs? They're readily available, and are priced the same or very close to the price of regular size RAM. Assuming two sticks of RAM, that would save even more room on the motherboard than a redesign of the 24-pin connector. Just look at the Asus P8H67-I Deluxe for an example. :)Reply

It's not just mITX boards that would have a problem with right angled ATX power sockets. Unless the PSU also included a right angle 24pin cable it would be problematic in any case that uses cable management holes to route the cables behind the mobo tray. Trying to make a 90* bend in that cramped a space would put a lot of torque on the socket; a big ugly loop sticking up allows for a much looser and less stressful bend.Reply

For dimm sizes I think it's mostly a capacity issue. For more modest builds it probably doesn't matter; but higher capacities tend to come out a year or two sooner in full size dimms because you can jam more chips onto them if need be. Currently DDR3 dimms and sodimms both max out at 8GB for desktops; but if you're willing to pay the price premium server ram is available in up to 32GB dimms.Reply

True, but how about SO-DIMMs on a budget Intel H81/B85 or AMD A55/A75 board? Or one of the low-power Intel Atom or AMD Brazos ITX boards? Or even a budget Z87 ITX board, to avoid the need for a vertically mounted VRM daughterboard (unless that's actually cheaper to do)? More space for surface mounted components, and probably cheaper to make the board? Could also mean less PCB layers?Reply

You're only saving 36 pins/dimm (204 vs 240); so there's no where near enough savings to drop a PCB layer. Beyond that I'd guess that since they do offer some models with SoDIMM slots that they just don't sell as well. If I had to guesses why it'd be that people are more likely to have spare DIMMs laying around than spare SoDIMMs; meaning that the total build cost is lower since the ram is free and/or the cost savings from larger DIMMs are enough to drive shoppers.

The one configuration I could see driving some enthusiast/gamer consumption of SoDIMM based mITX boards would be 4 slots instead of only 2 for 32GB max instead of 16; is conspicuous by its absence.Reply

The motherboard manufacturer has options when deciding which digital display outputs are put on the motherboard itself. Typically we see HDMI, DP and DVI-D, though as I mention in comparison to other motherboards, some manufacturers can switch up the DP to a HDMI like this motherboard here. Other manufacturers will only use two digital displays (HDMI/DVI-D or DP/HDMI) and take the VGA from the chipset. I've never used a DP monitor in my personal life (I used DP for the 4K article), so I guess I would prefer multiple HDMI ports to rig up a couple of 1080p monitors. Manufacturers have an option of a DVI-I (combined DVI-D and VGA), although few actually do so.

I happen to be working with a mini-ITX motherboard that goes along all three digital displays (HDMI/DP) with the combination DVI-I right now :)

AFAIK AMD hasn't made any GPUs (discrete or integrated) that have 3 legacy (VGA/DVi/HDMI) clock generators; as a result you'd need an active adapter. Intel's the same; with only some of nVidia's higher end cards supporting 3 non-DP displays.Reply

Had to check to see how everything was plugged in. None of my monitors has DP (the most recent one was made in 2006). One CRT (1920x1440x75Hz) using the DVI output with a VGA adapter, one LCD (1280x1024x60Hz) using the DP output with a DVI adapter, and one LCD (1920x1200x60Hz) using the HDMI output with a DVI adapter. I guess maybe the DP>DVI adapter could be active, if it can be active without being powered, but two a year and a half ago it was like twenty bucks as opposed to the sixty or seventy or more most others were and everything works fine. It was not a big a deal as the scary research I'd done suggested it would be.Reply

Love my job, since I've been bringing in $82h… I sit at home, music playing while I work in front of my new iMac that I got now that I'm making it online. (Home more information)http://goo.gl/UDMcRUReply

Nice review. I've done three builds now with the Intel equivalent of this board and it's really a nice board (one office PC and two HTPCs). The WiFi is exceptional and there have been no dropouts at all. Fortunately on the Intel board the 4 pin power connector is in a more manageable space.Reply

I think this missed the biggest reason to do this review... comparing against other mini-ITX systems in cases that don't support graphics cards. That's where this setup is truly interesting. It felt more like a CPU review with a motherboard review tacked onto it and missed the uniqueness this combo could offer.Reply

How long does GIGABYTE usually take to stop providing BIOS updates? Looking at some of their older boards on their site shows the latest BIOS is a beta BIOS and was only less than a year from the initial BIOS date. Providing a beta BIOS as the latest version doesn't very good either.Reply

I just built a HTPC with this board. Works like a charm! One thing to think about though, I bought the "Streacom FC8S EVO Silver", fanless HTPC case. The case uses 4 heatpipes connected to the CPU, but due to the placing of the ATX connector on this MB, I could only connect 3 heatpipes. No big deal, but had I known before I might had choosen another board.Reply